Turbulent presents, precarious futures: urbanization and the deployment of global infrastructure

Abstract

This is a repository copy of Turbulent presents, precarious futures: urbanization and the deployment of global infrastructure.

Relational regulation and Chinese real estate investment in London: moving beyond the territorial trap

“…A Digital Hub has been set up and London & Partners has organized associated promotions events that included the Chinese ambassador and other government players. In this respect the mayor is replicating the activities of territorial agencies in locations such as East Africa and Central and Southern Europe who have seen the OBOR as a potential source for investment (Anthony, 2020;Wiig & Silver, 2019). However, there is also a tension in these agendas between seeking to attract money to finance new home-building, but at the same time being cautious about attracting more Chinese buyers to take up the new residences.…”

“…First, amongst major property developers and investors there had been a recent reduction in investment in major projects and the rise of new players attracted to relatively low-risk, welfare-based forms of housing, especially care homes for the elderly. The image of Chinese buyers investing in high-end, high-return, high-rise buildings (Wiig & Silver, 2019) is slowly changing in the wake of growing regulatory pressure from the Chinese government. RCA data show that the main investor in new projects since 2018 has been Cindat Capital Management, a SOE that has over £2.6 billionworth of assets worldwide and specializes in the delivery and production of care homes.…”

How to understand a development corridor? The case of Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia‐Transport corridor in Kenya

“…In light of this emerging geographical research on development corridors, in this paper I provide three possible ways to theorise imaginaries and material practices of development corridors and their function in sustaining socio-political orders increasingly dominated by global capitalism. I do this by bringing this emerging literature in conversation with geographical scholarship on infrastructure that highlights the structural role of infrastructural developments in ordering capitalist relations across the globe (Danyluk, 2017;Kanai & Schindler, 2018;Wiig & Silver, 2019). I also draw on theorisation of infrastructure as biopolitical governance of life, characterised by multi-layered interplay between the state and its modernisation practices, on the one hand, and populations subjected to unstable imaginaries of "progress" and "development" embodied by infrastructures, on the other, within ethnographically grounded critical social science more broadly (Anand, 2017;Ghertner, 2015;Harvey & Knox, 2012Larkin, 2013).…”

“…Using the example of LAPSSET, I demonstrate how imaginaries and material practices of development corridors could be understood as playing a particular socio-political function in three interrelated ways: as (1) practices of establishing new frontiers of extractive capital accumulation that (2) create fragmented state territoriality characterised by complex interaction between the state and private actors, and (3) advance capitalist "modernity" that marginalises populations of the regions "opened up" by infrastructural developments. Besides providing theorisation for the emerging geographical research on development corridors (Enns, 2017;Lesutis, 2019a;Mosley & Watson, 2016), these three ways of reading the socio-political function of LAPSSET in Kenya also contribute to the recent geographical scholarship on mega-infrastructures that particularly focuses on the planetary restructuring of global capitalist relations through urban infrastructures (Easterling, 2014;Kanai & Schindler, 2018;Rao, 2014;Wiig & Silver, 2019). The paper shows how the globally structured politics of infrastructuresuch as development corridorsadvance capitalist expansion by materialising not just in urban or peri-urban contexts, as is common to focus within the literature, but also more broadly re-produce geographies of states, characterised by extractivism, contested territorialities, and normative ordering of life.…”

China's Belt and Road Initiative and the emerging geographies of global urbanisation

“…The nodal geographies of the BRI combine established spaces of global finance (e.g., Singapore, London) and extraction (e.g., oil fields of the Arabian Gulf) with historic and revived spaces of ancient trade (e.g., Mombasa, Khorgos-Almaty) and new spaces of extraction (e.g., the Arctic). This is driving a particular form of spatial and scalar development that Wiig and Silver (2019) call "Silk Road urbanism. "…”